Give me something to assemble, I won’t look at the directions, I’ll try to figure it out by myself. It’s why I love Ikea furniture.

I consider the fact that thousands of children die each day from starvation and a lack of medicine a crisis for humanity and a problem we must collectively attempt to solve.

I don’t need therapy. I’m not going to see a therapist; comedy acts as my therapy. I put my problems out there. I talk about them. I talk about everything before anybody has a chance.

It has not yet become obvious to me that there’s no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there’s no real problem, but I’m not sure there’s no real problem.

My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative. I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.

We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

My message, especially to young people is to have courage to think differently, courage to invent, to travel the unexplored path, courage to discover the impossible and to conquer the problems and succeed. These are great qualities that they must work towards. This is my message to the young people.

Entrepreneurs are natural problem-solvers, which means that we always have ideas for new businesses popping into our heads. Having a lot of options is great, but sometimes it can be hard to focus on one when you are keen to move onto the next.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

It’s just human nature to try and figure things out. So, when we’re in the midst of a situation, we usually try to reason our way through it.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

Such a chimerical idea as telegraphing vocal sounds would indeed, to most minds, seem scarcely feasible enough to spend time in working over. I believe, however, that it is feasible and that I have got the cue to the solution of the problem.

I’m of the school of thought where, if you can’t sort something out for yourself, no one can help you. Rehab is great for some people but not others.

I don’t have a magic formula for prioritizing the world’s problems.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

I’ve seen how the issues that come across a president’s desk are always the hard ones – the problems where no amount of data or numbers will get you to the right answer.

I’m of the school of thought where if you can’t sort something out for yourself then no one can help you.

There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.

Don’t tell your problems to people: eighty percent don’t care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.

There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves.

The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one’s furniture.

My earliest books focus almost entirely on psychological tools to help readers employ effective commonsense approaches to problems. There are no references to God or a higher self in the first 15 or so years of my publishing history.

I think equation guessing might be the best method to proceed to obtain the laws for the part of physics which is presently unknown. Yet, when I was much younger, I tried this equation guessing, and I have seen many students try this, but it is very easy to go off in wildly incorrect and impossible directions.

I do not believe there is a problem in this country or the world today which could not be settled if approached through the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount.

There’s an urgent need to stop reacting to each immediate vexing issue in isolation. Such response often creates unanticipated second-order effects and even more problems for us.

A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

Through the right people focusing on the right things, we can, in time, get on top of a lot if not most of the problems of this world. And that’s what a number of us are trying to do.

Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.

You’ve got to work things out in the cloakroom, and when you’ve got them worked out, you can debate a little before you vote.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

Inside of every problem lies an opportunity.

When I have been travelling around to speak in different countries, I am always offered help to write about the specific climate policies in specific countries. But that is not really necessary. Because the basic problem is the same everywhere.

Sometimes if you got a problem deep rooted in your life, it takes a little bit of time to overcome it in that area.

I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.

Our problem right now is that we’re so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there’s a little utopia.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

I had noticed that many of these successful people, historical and contemporary, shared certain common traits. They had a way of thinking that was exceptionally fluid; they could adapt to almost any circumstance; when confronted with problems, they could look at them from novel perspectives and solve them.

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.

I felt I had to solve everyone’s problems.

We no longer think of chairs as technology; we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‚crash‘ when we tried to use them.

When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems.

Until I was a teenager, I used red pokeberries for lipstick and a burnt matchstick for eyeliner. I used honeysuckle for perfume.

I have one yardstick by which I test every major problem – and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

I spend a lot of time just, you know, with my girlfriend and my dog. And I mean, we don’t have a lot of furniture in our house, so it’s really simple. And we’re trying to build products for everyone in the world, right. And you don’t want to get isolated to do that.

It’s the way I study – to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.

The drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.

The question is not, ‚Do you have a problem?‘ The question is, ‚Does the problem have you?‘

You’d be waiting 30 or 40 years for me to build a table. I have more than two left hands.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

Don’t bother people for help without first trying to solve the problem yourself.

I love Los Angeles, and it’s been very good to me, but if everyone is running around telling the stories, who’s living them? You don’t play characters that are celebrities – you play guys who know what to do when their septic tank’s blocked.

I used to worry about every little thing, trying to figure out every problem. Well, I realize now how foolish that was. I was no more in control of my life than the man on the moon.

This desk of mine is one at which a man may die, but from which he cannot resign.